Containing Gender Outlaws, Stigmatizing the Left

Abstract

This article analyses the formation of cisgenderist and transphobic discourses in the reporting of the Daily Mail during the Thatcher era (1979-1990). It explores the emergence of a discursive strategy that focused on the containment of forms of gender expression that the socially conservative newspaper saw as a threat to the normative understandings of gender that it cherished. At the same time, it discusses how the paper managed the tension between its desire to contain and marginalize these individuals existed and its need to fetishize them for the purposes of commercial and political gain. It ties its reporting on trans people to other important trends in conservative politics, including the moralistic campaigns of Mary Whitehouse to regulate television broadcasting, and the forms of political homophobia that appeared under the government of Margaret Thatcher.

KEYWORDS:

• Transphobia
• containment
• fetishization
• homophobia
• conservatism
• transgender

In 2017, Guardian columnist Owen Jones published an opinion piece observing the parallels between contemporary transphobia in conservative media and the monstering of gay, lesbian and bisexual people by Thatcher era conservative press outlets:

Back then, gay people were sexual predators; a ‘gay lobby’ was brainwashing children; being gay was a mental illness, or just a phase … replace ‘gay’ with ‘trans’, and that’s the state of the British Press in 2017¹

While the making of such parallels is crucial to exposing the historic roots of contemporary transphobia, this article also aims to unsettle a neat periodization which marks out the 1980s as the era of press homophobia, and the 21st century as one of press transphobia. There are plenty of academic texts on the history of homophobia,² yet studies of transphobia remain remarkably presentist. The term ‘transphobia’ was not in use in the 1980s, though much of what was understood as homophobia then—the demonization of ‘effeminate’ gay men—might also be read as transphobic today. Although it is fair to say that newspaper bigots directed most their animus in the former period against what they saw as ‘homosexuality’ whereas today it is directed against the ‘transgender madness’,³ plenty of trans people were caught up in the conservative press campaign against gay rights in the 1980s too.

It is true anti-trans articles did not appear in this era in the same volume as articles targeted at gay men at the peak of the AIDS pandemic and the battles over section 28, or anti-trans articles in today’s media environment. Fae argues in her study of press coverage of trans lives that in this era it was ‘sporadic’ in contrast to today and the ‘concerted nastiness’ began in 1989 with The Independent’s publication of prominent feminist Germaine Greer’s invective against trans women as a ‘gross parody’ of cis women.⁴ Nevertheless, this article aims to show—through an analysis of transphobic discourse in the Daily Mail, one of the bastions of the conservative press establishment and foremost protagonists of the campaign against gay rights—that trans identities were weaponized politically in the decade before Greer’s article in 1989. None of the ‘feminist’ critiques associated with Greer and later ‘gender criticals’ appear in the Mail in this era—although they were certainly present, if not as prominently, in the broadsheet press,⁵ often mixed together with more supportive coverage.⁶ Meanwhile it is well established that tabloids in this era, particularly the Sun and News of the World, sensationalized and fetishized trans experiences so as to enthrall their readers,⁷ and the Mail was no different. What was distinct for this period—see the stories on Les Tate, Rachael Webb and Julia Grant discussed below—was the extent to which the Mail was willing to weaponize trans identities for political purposes in line with its broader campaign against the political left’s support for gay rights.

While there was no self-conscious anti-trans movement that was amplified by the press as is the case today, the Mail produced a number of articles that put trans people at the centre of divisive political and cultural campaigns, and which served the same purpose as similar articles do today—to discredit sexual progressives and left-wing politics more broadly by associating them with the ‘extremity’ of trans identities. Although queer academics and activists may disagree as to whether trans individuals’ gender identities should be understood separately from their sexuality,⁸ what we can conclude—as this article will illustrate—is that conservative outlets read trans individuals as a threat to sexual as well as gender norms, and that as such transphobia was interweaved with homophobia in their rhetoric. As was the case with the conservative press’s treatment of the broader gay rights movement, the battle was fought in the realms of television, culture, education, and council politics as well as through narratives about crime and social order. The political weaponization of trans identities often went hand in hand with their fetishization for commercial purposes. Much has been written on the manner in which the conservative press used the lives of gay men and prostitutes to sell papers in latter half of the twentieth century, as the impulse to maintain silences about non-conforming sexual subjects gave way to the desire to profit out of publicly shaming them.⁹ The Mail’s reporting on trans lives fitted into the same pattern.

In looking at the political agendas that informed anti-trans rhetoric in the Mail, we need to appreciate the limitations of definitions of transphobia that understand it simply as ‘fear’ of trans people. Hostility to trans people is often driven by political ideology as much as knee-jerk fear.¹⁰ As analysts of homophobia have also observed, we should recognize that the focus on ‘phobia’ risks reducing powerful discursive structures to the level of an individual neurosis.¹¹ Transphobia can be understood, in Bettcher’s words, as ‘a hostile response to perceived violations of gender norms and/or to challenges to the gender binary’.¹² In this context, it is important to recognize that transphobia is not simply directed at people who explicitly identify as trans, just as homophobia is not simply directed at those who explicitly identify as gay.¹³ Bettcher notes that although transphobia literally denotes a ‘fear’, in many ways it is rational endeavour that grows from, and seeks to sustain, a wider cisgenderist system.¹⁴ This was why the Mail’s discourse was also one of containment, insofar as it deemed gender subversion acceptable only so long as it remained within realms the realm of the comedic or fantastical, and did not transform the norms of everyday life. Meanwhile, stigmatization goes beyond phobia in so far as it actively constructs a hierarchy which leads to marginalized others being seen as inferior and shameful in society.¹⁵ Many of the most prejudiced and virulent anti-trans stories produced in the Mail, in past as in present, have been written not necessarily due to instinctive fear but to amplify stigma, preserve gendered social hierarchies and empower specific political agendas—while discrediting those of its opponents. In making these points, this article will draw on insights from Critical Discourse Analysis, as a tool for deconstructing ways in which language has been used to transform power dynamics within society.¹⁶ In particular, it will draw on the work of Critical Discourse Analysts who have exposed the tendency of tabloids to ‘creat[e] moral ‘others’’¹⁷ out of marginalized communities and put forward a particular vision of social order in doing so.¹⁸

The anti-trans sentiment that the Mail both spoke to and engineered was not exactly the same as that of today’s anti-trans discourses. As noted, the political right’s tactical appropriation of feminist rhetoric is not in evidence in the period I have sampled, and there is little evidence of an effort to establish an opposition between gay rights and trans rights. Indeed, much of the Mail’s rhetoric of hostility towards gender transgression in the articles studied here stems precisely from its perceived association with homosexuality. The legacy of the public discourses that constituted ‘effeminate’ gay men as most ‘abnormal’ is relevant here.¹⁹ It is perhaps on account of the press’s obsession with the ‘effeminate’ homosexual that there are vastly more accounts of ‘transsexuals’ and ‘transvestites’ assigned male at birth than there are of their assigned female equivalents. In the 1930s the press had been far more interested in ‘female to male’ cases, but with ‘male to female’ surgeries becoming more frequent in the wake of the coverage given to Christine Jorgensen in 1952, and then the widely publicized divorce trial of April Ashley in 1970s, the press became far more fixated upon trans women.²⁰ Judge Ormorod’s designation of Ashley as legally male, and the implicit characterization of the actress as a homosexual who had transitioned to seduce heterosexual men,²¹ formed an important background to the intensification of the Mail’s transphobia in the 1980s, as its hostility to gay rights increased.

A note on terminology: the research for this article was done by keyword searching the Daily Mail Historical Archive for terms such as ‘transvestite’, ‘transsexual’ (sometimes hyphenated as trans-sexual or spelled differently as transexual), as well as the now outdated ‘sex-change’. A few useful hits also resulted from searching for the term ‘androgynous’. The term ‘transgender’, though it existed before, did not become prominent in public discourse in Western societies till the 1990s, when it was popularized by queer activists seeking to challenge binary notions of male and female.²² As such no search result for it appears in the archive until 1996. Similarly, terms like ‘trans woman’ and ‘genderqueer’ were not in currency in this period. In the Mail’s usage from 1980s ‘transvestite’ often referenced those who society saw as ‘effeminate’ gay men, although it did also identify ‘transvestites’ who were in relationships with women, and sometimes both women and men. At times, the Mail identified the ‘transvestite’ purely on occupational grounds, as an entertainer or comedian, rather than as someone who was representative of a sexual or gender minority. As we will see, it strove hard to construct this form of ‘transvestite’ as most worthy.

‘Transvestite’ was a label which those described by it often had far less of a say over than is the case today, and some in transgender communities are now wary of it because it has become associated with insinuation of sexual motives for cross-gender behaviour and identification. In the last couple of decades, many of those who the media described as ‘transvestites’ have embraced the term transgender and associated terms like trans women, non-binary, genderqueer and transfeminine/transmasculine even though in some cases they do not wish to undergo the physical changes associated with transsexualism.²³ This said, it is necessary to assess carefully the merits and potential pitfalls of identifying those termed ‘transvestites’ by the Daily Mail in the 1980s as trans women or non-binary. It is not always possible to determine how individuals deemed as ‘transvestites’ in one era would choose to define themselves in an era in which there is a wider scope of potential for self-identification. One figure represented as a ‘transvestite’ in the coverage discussed below, who is still in the public eye, Julian Clary, identifies principally as a ‘camp, effeminate homosexual’²⁴ and retains male pronouns. However, as Stryker notes, the term transgender need not necessarily refer only to those who do not identify with their birth gender.²⁵ This article will follow her practise of using transgender to ‘refer to the widest imaginable range of gender variant practises and identities’²⁶ in historical contexts. As a rule, where there is evidence that an individual’s cross-dressing was related to identification as a gender other than that assigned at birth I will use the pronoun for the relevant gender, and gender-neutral pronouns where the historical record indicates they might not have identified as either male or female or where evidence is unclear.²⁷

Thatcherism, Section 28 and Transphobia as Part of the War on the ‘Loony Left’

One of the reasons that the Mail’s hostility to the visibility of trans identities was so pronounced in the 1980s was that its outlook had shifted in the direction of a more aggressive Conservatism defined by a close alliance with the ‘New Right’ under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Having been lukewarm about Ted Heath, the Conservative prime minister of the early 1970s, David English as editor of the Mail embraced Thatcher’s government (1979-1990) wholeheartedly, eagerly endorsing her narrative that Labour were seeking to impose a socialist regime via stealth.²⁸ By the 1980s the post-war ideological consensus had collapsed and Thatcher had introduced a more reactionary form of Conservatism in opposition to the urban left’s support for gay rights, women’s liberation and anti-racist politics.²⁹ The trans rights movement was not yet as organized as it would be two decades later, but with increasing public visibility and access to medical pathways, support networks were beginning to form in major urban centres, and organizations such as the Transsexual Action Group shared much of the activist approach of the other social movements of the era.³⁰ The transphobia of the Thatcherite era was a backlash against an incipient trans activism that was slowly becoming more vocal and confident, just as it was a backlash against the urban left generally.

Thatcherism promoted an exclusionary form of British identity, exploiting the scapegoating of gay men for AIDS by conflating homosexuality with HIV as a threat to an authentic and heterosexualized British public.³¹ In 1988 Thatcher’s parliament famously passed the ‘Section 28’ amendment to the 1986 Local Government Act, which both made it illegal for local authorities to either ‘intentionally promote homosexuality’ or ‘promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’.³² Although Section 28 specifically targeted the teaching of homosexuality, both the homophobic campaigning that preceded the Act and the Act itself generated a considerable amount of transphobia, not least within the Mail as the newspaper most closely aligned with Thatcherism. Many of the sex education texts that were targeted in the context of the Act offered support and advice for ‘transvestites’ as well as homosexuals. For instance, the Mail reported in horror that ‘Eton, traditional bastion against the permissive society’ was issuing its students with a ‘sex manual’ that ‘lists 18 organisations to help homosexuals, transvestites and paedophiles’.³³

For the Mail, stigmatizing the links between Labour politics and support for gay and trans rights was key to delegitimizing it as an electoral force. The Labour controlled Greater London Council (GLC)—which Thatcher’s government would abolish in 1986—was at the heart of a new movement of the ‘urban left’ in local government, that had moved away from conventional class politics and sought to appeal to those marginalized on the basis of their gender, ethnicity and sexuality.³⁴ The Conservatives and the right wing press were campaigning to shut down the GLC, and used what they branded as its ‘loony left’ politics to discredit the Labour party in the 1983 elections, then attacked its individual successors using the same rhetoric during the 1987 elections, amidst the public battle over Section 28.³⁵

In 1981, both Labour’s National Executive Committee and the Labour controlled Greater London Council had declared their intent to work towards adopting a policy on gay rights.³⁶ Subsequently, hostility towards gay rights was weaponized against Labour during elections and by elections.³⁷ While the Mail launched its campaign against gay rights rather than trans rights, it also understood the incipient trans rights movement a part of the broader gay rights movement—for instance, it reported with gleeful horror that left wingers at the 1982 Labour Conference had circulated an edition of the London Labour Briefing that ‘includes explicit articles on lesbians, transvestitism and homosexuality’.³⁸ Transvestitism could be used to scandalize the Gay Rights movement, and both the Gay Rights and Trans Rights movements could be used to demonize the left more broadly. Hence, in an article of 1982 on Michael Foot’s ‘Court of Fools’ and their impact on Labour’s electability, Paul Johnson maintained that the party now embraced ‘open partisans of every kind of extremist activity, from terrorism to transvestites. What shocked many this week was the audacity of the Gay Rights movement within the party. It is nonsense to say that such groups are merely on the margin … ’.³⁹ It is worth noting in this context that those gay men who had made breakthroughs in national politics and brought about ‘tolerance’ in public discourse had done so by distancing themselves from gender non-conformists, and performing an idealized integral masculinity.⁴⁰

The Mail followed up its article on the 1982 Conference by going into more depth on the article produced for London Labour Briefing by Les Tate of the Lambeth Labour party, who it described as a ‘self-confessed transvestite’. It reproduced a number of Tate’s statements verbatim—such as ‘every stereotyped tough man is hiding the secret woman within’⁴¹—but made no effort to rebut or deconstruct them. Identifying the mere existence of these views was sufficient to discredit them, and their party by association. An article two weeks later dragged Tate into the education wars, lamenting ‘Now he has given advice on how to bring up children in a newsletter for parents who send their under-fives to a South London creche’, and claiming the creche’s entire £5,000 grant would be spent on this newsletter and that the Conservative Chairman of Lambeth Council was reviewing the matter.⁴²

The Mail in characterizing transvestitism as a form of political extremism sought to stigmatize the urban left’s attempts to empower other marginalized communities. A piece written on Labour’s preparations for the 1987 elections, during which the Conservatives launches an extremely divisive campaign against gay rights,⁴³ claimed.

Streatham Labour Party is in deep trouble. Apparently, applicants to be the next prospective Parliamentary candidates must be female or black to stand a chance of shortlisting. White men are clear outsiders. And that’s the problem. A tip-off tells me that a transvestite is going to apply. I wonder how the Streatham Labour Party will classify him or her, especially if he or she is Chinese or Red Indian rather than black.⁴⁴

Here, the Daily Mail people sardonically instrumentalized trans people as an ‘extreme’ so as to discredit wider efforts at minority representation. The toxic legacy of this kind of transphobic discourse is one reason, at the time of writing, no openly transgender candidate has been able to obtain a seat in the House of Commons.⁴⁵

The Section 28 amendment to the Local Government Act was also part of Thatcher’s war on local councils, which had become a powerhouse of the progressive urban left, particularly in London. The Conservative government maintained that these councils were being taken over by radical socialists seeking to bypass parliamentary democracy, and identified the influence of gay rights pressure groups there as evidence of the subversion of British values within local government.⁴⁶ The Mail eagerly promoted the government’s narrative that urban local government authorities were a hotbed of sexual depravity—and it was willing to scapegoat trans as well as gay individuals in doing so. In its reporting from the 1980s, the visibility of trans women was often correlated with the presence of Labour in local government. For instance, an article entitled ‘Sex-Change father’s job is safe’ explained regarding the transition at work of Siobhan McDermott that ‘Council officials at Labour-controlled [my italics] Coventry decided […] was entitled to retain his [sic] position at the city's education HQ under the authority's equal opportunities policy’.⁴⁷ Another story headlined ‘Sex Change Shock at Council Home’ reported that ‘Labour run Lambeth Council’ had employed an officer who had been sacked as a nurse and subsequently aborted their transition after it was found that they had been taking hormones.⁴⁸ In the midst of the 1986 council elections, during which the Conservatives also campaigned very prominently against the Labour-controlled councils’ support for gay rights,⁴⁹ the Mail ran a lengthy piece on Rachael Webb, a trans woman standing as a council candidate in a Lambeth Ward. It was simply titled ‘Left’s sex-swop election hopeful’, and alleged that her surgery had been illegitimately funded using local government money.⁵⁰ This reporting fed on a broader right-wing narrative that local councils were a source of needless expenditure.⁵¹

Containing Discourses

The Mail’s efforts to politicize trans identities were not limited to its coverage of the Labour Party: it also devoted a great deal of attention to gender transgression in film, music and TV. Here, the discourse was often one of containment—the Mail’s authors sought to legitimize those forms of cross-gender entertainment that could be neatly confined within the realms of the comedic or the fantastical, and stigmatize those that threatened to transform societal norms more broadly along the lines envisioned by the gay liberation movement.⁵² Patriarchal societies in the West have historically sought to construct the public realm as a preserve of men and the private as the domain of the feminine—queer and trans individuals evidently possessed the potential to upend this arrangement.⁵³ As Alison Oram notes, earlier in the twentieth century, theatres and music halls had established ‘confined spaces’ within which ‘opposition to the gender order can be expressed and thereby defused’.⁵⁴ Although many of the on-stage female impersonators had ties to gay subcultures in their private lives, they deliberately returned to male dress at the end of their live acts, ‘thereby revealing the temporary nature of the subversion’.⁵⁵ Effeminacy had come to be associated with homosexuality in the popular mind by the 1930s, but while the police in this era targeted private drag balls, the theatrical tradition of female impersonation continued.⁵⁶ However, the rise of television as a form of mass media, with its potential to blur the boundaries between the private and the public, raised the stakes considerably as far as social conservatives were concerned, leading to the formation of Mary Whitehouse’s ‘Clean up TV’ campaign in 1964.⁵⁷ The Mail itself heaped lavish praise on Whitehouse and her campaigns,⁵⁸ and gave her frequent column space.⁵⁹

One of the consequences of the Mail’s increasing tendency to represent the trans movement as an extreme fringe of the gay rights movement was that it often understood trans individuals less in terms of their gender identity and more in terms of the sexual threat they posed. For the Mail’s writers, this threat was magnified as trans lives became more visible on screen. For instance, writing in the TV Mail, Charles Catchpole followed up his stark headline ‘how sex crept back onto your TV screen’ with the immediate explanation that ‘This Monday, on BBC television, millions of viewers will see a man living out his life as a woman’.⁶⁰ The BBC had been a particular subject of social conservatives’ wrath in the years since Mary Whitehouse, quoted as an authority in Catchpole’s article, had founded her campaign.⁶¹ The hostile response to the documentary was also a hostile response to increasing trans activist consciousness—the national broadcaster had already put on screens a documentary on trans rights by four activists from the trans community earlier in the decade.⁶² The opening of the NHS Charing Cross gender clinic in 1966 had offered a medical pathway to transition for many who would not have been able to afford it before, even if gatekeeping practises were severe.⁶³ The fact that transition was now available to a much wider social spectrum was, presumably, part of the reason for the Mail’s unease—Catchpole noted with some discomfort that Grant was ‘the burly son [sic] of a Fleetwood trawlerman’. The treatment of Grant contrasts with the much more favourable coverage the Mail had granted middle-class journalist Jan Morris after her transition became public,⁶⁴ and subsequently.⁶⁵

Catchpole’s report misgendered and deadnamed Julia Grant in the process of describing her electrolysis, hormone treatment and bottom surgery as discussed in the BBC documentary. It then segued into a broader diatribe about documentaries covering such matters as gay sex, prostitution and pornography, all prefixed by the lament that ‘Sex … is currently making a considerable impact on television just a year after Britain’s leading TV executives promised to purge nudity and eroticism from their programmes … ’ What is notable here is that the Mail used the documentary about transsexualism to highlight for its reader what it considered to be the most shocking aspect of the sexual revolution, without explaining why transsexualism should be understood as sexual in the erotic sense, or providing evidence as to why the motivations for Grant’s transition should be considered ‘sexual’. The Mail itself had reported similar details of the surgical process in the 1950s and 1960s without seeing those who submitted themselves to it as in any way erotically motivated.⁶⁶ Now, however, transsexualism was caught up in a more holistic set of moral concerns, which enabled the Mail to recode what it actually feared as a threat to the gender binary as sexual danger.

The Mail’s reporting in this period spoke to a fear of the ‘queering’ or subversion of broader society by androgynes in the public eye, such as the openly gay New York film producer Andy Warhol and his drag queen protégés who had been at the heart of the US counter-culture movement since the 60s.⁶⁷ Auberon Waugh complained … 

Nearly everybody reading this page, I imagine, lived through the sixties in one way or another. Were we aware that someone called Andy Warhol, a pasty-faced, androgynous New York libertine was setting the tone for all of us [my italics] with his lifestyle and partying?⁶⁸

Evidently, Warhol posed a threat to the wider public that the more easily minoritized and contained masculine homosexual did not.⁶⁹ Waugh contemptuously quoted Warhol's observation that:

Just like drugs had come into the average person’s life, sexual blurs did too, and people began identifying a little more with drag queens, seeing them more as ‘sexual radicals’ than depressing losers.⁷⁰

Waugh wished to ensure that transvestites and androgynous gay men continued to be understood as as social deviants, contained and marginalized as ‘weirdos’. The title of his piece, ‘the boring wasteland of weirdo Warhol’, made Warhol and his associates ‘others’ inhabiting a space beyond the moral territory inhabited by ‘us’, but serving the purpose of delineating what was to be acceptable within Waugh’s in-group.⁷¹

One strategy for containing a potentially subversive androgyny that was adopted by another Mail writer, Mary Kenny, was to attempt to reinforce the distinction between ‘transvestite’ and ‘transsexual’, and to define each so that neither threatened either the gender binary or sexual propriety. Commenting on a BBC documentary covering the lives of both transvestites and transsexuals, she lamented that the decision to include both within one programme led to ‘a serious conflation of the comic with the tragic’. Kenny explained:

First, we were introduced to a transvestite. Now, travesty is a theatrical tradition, which goes back to the masquerade and the commedia dell’arte; it is a word, a bit of a laugh … then came the tran-sexuals, the people who feel they are born into the wrong gender and feel driven to castrate themselves, if men, or have mastectomies and hysterectomies, if women. This is very far from being a laugh, and it did not belong in the same programme at all.⁷²

Here, Kenny sought to foreclose the changes that would a decade later lead to both ‘transvestites’ and ‘transsexuals’ being brought together under the common rubric of ‘transgender’. She reinforced the traditional understanding of transvestitism as purely comedic profession, with no relation to gender identity, while using the contemporary category of transsexualism to conflate gender identity with physical sex so that only those who feel so strongly as to undergo surgical transformation could be considered genuinely feminine.

The Mail gave positive coverage to entertainers who openly identified as heterosexual and made clear their transvestitism was purely professional. For instance, Stanley Baxter declared in an interview with Joe Steeples that.

I hate the sort of female impersonator who seems to be enjoying himself more than the audience is. That’s the criteria. Drag should be used towards an end- to get a laugh—and not become an end in itself.⁷³

One entertainer that the Mail lambasted for performing the wrong sort of drag was Julian Clary, who was at the time also an open campaigner for gay rights. The Mail’s Paul Palmer wrote a furious review of his new television show Sticky Moments, fulminating that ‘If this is humour the (sick) joke must be on us’.⁷⁴ Palmer was particularly angry that Clary’s show was on what he contemptuously described as ‘the intellectual’s Channel, Channel 4’. In one scene that particularly outraged Palmer, male and female contestants were both dressed in Wild West outfits, but each wearing clothing associated with the opposite sex. Presumably this form of gender parody was more threatening to the Mail because, as per Butler, rather than depending on the mimesis of an ‘original’ gender norm, it subverted and undermined the very forms of binary gender construct—cowboys and cowgirls—that social conservatives valued.⁷⁵ The Mail’s hostility towards Clary appears to stem from his refusal to stay confined within his role as the easily contained, minoritized homosexual and his enthusiasm for a broader gender revolution. Palmer lamented that ‘Clary’s particular targets are ordinary middle-aged women whom he successfully entices into the kind of obscene jokes and sexual innuendo they would never dream of uttering away from the somehow legitimising power of TV cameras’.

Between Phobia and Fetish

The irony of the Mail’s campaign to remove trans people from the public eye was that it fixated upon trans individuals almost in spite of itself. Here there are notable parallels with other forms of otherization. Colonial discourse, as Bhabha argues, is ‘ambivalent’ in the sense that it is constantly caught between ‘fear and desire’⁷⁶, and between ‘phobia’ and ‘fetish’,⁷⁷ that is between a desire to stigmatize colonized others and an impulse to fantasize about their difference. The Mail, more than most newspapers, was caught in this ambivalent nexus of phobia and fetish in its coverage of transgender others. It was a newspaper that sought to uphold conservative values, and appealed to socially conservative readers who sought to disavow homosexual and transgender others altogether and keep sex out of the newspapers and away from the TV screen. Yet it was also caught up in the tabloid revolution, and its editors knew that if it was to prosper financially it must appeal to a wider public market by embracing the culture of gossip columns and sexual rumour.⁷⁸ The life stories and experiences of transgender individuals were particularly lucrative in this regard, and as such were subjected to particularly sensationalist coverage.⁷⁹ The Mail may not have openly embraced the commercialized sexual fetishism associated with the Sun, but the extent to which fetishization coincided with morally outraged reporting, even in the paper’s coverage of transgender issues, is remarkable. Smith’s observation that ‘Homophobic discourse is organized not around a fear of otherness but around an obsession with otherness’⁸⁰ is also pertinent to the Mail’s transphobic reporting.

Tabloid reporting on prostitution in this era fetishized the women covered by drawing the reader’s attention to the elements of their attire deemed most salacious.⁸¹ The Mail’s coverage of trans individuals mirrored this trend. For instance, in 1984, it reported the discovery that a recently deceased researcher was a transvestite in an article titled ‘secret life of a kinky government scientist’. Rather than simply reporting that the individual happened to be a transvestite, or not reporting it at all, it added that ‘He was dressed in women’s clothing, with a padded bra, black wig, high-heeled shoes and black stockings, and a pair of knickers over his head’.⁸² The report, noting the sensitivity of their research, conflated security fears with moral fears in a manner similar to the persecutors of Alan Turing a generation earlier, but beyond this nationalist and conservative agenda there was an obvious effort to extract lurid details that would increase the paper’s circulation. The Mail frequently used reports on trans women to describe their clothing in depth—for instance, one woman was described attending work in ‘a skirt, blouse and high-heeled shoes and wig’.⁸³ Such narratives often served the purpose of caricaturing trans women as superficial and sexually motivated,⁸⁴ but they were also a product of the Mail’s own commercial fetishism.

The intersection of phobia and fetish was also starkly visible in a piece by the Mail’s TV reporter, Herbert Kretzmer, on a BBC documentary about the transvestite and drag artist Lorrie Lee’s life in London’s ‘sexual underworld’.⁸⁵ Lee was at one point described as ‘grotesque’, but Kretzmer did not shy away from describing the artist’s ‘slit, sequinned dress exposing one slim, stockinged leg to the upper thigh’. Kretzmer speculated that watching Lee ‘throwing raw, lurid lines at his [sic] entranced, disbelieving audience’ would have prompted many viewers to switch off and write angry letters of complaint to the BBC, but continued by observing.

For those of you who persevered, however, the programme provided a fascinating, slightly alarming glimpse of life in Britain’s flourishing sexual underworld, an unsuspected habitat of freaks and hybrids, where all the rules are different … 

Kretzmer’s language—‘raw’, ‘lurid’, ‘alarming’, ‘freaks’, shows how hyperbole can be used designate individuals and groups as ‘other’.⁸⁶ Nevertheless his ‘perseverance’ follows a pattern laid out by Shelley: ‘since the other is fascinating, an ambivalent two-step may follow: I step back then step forward again’⁸⁷

Nowhere was the connection between othering and fetishization more evident than in the Mail’s crime reporting. Let us take, for instance, this narrative concerning the burglar David/Davina Martin:

He was an expert in disguise, a chameleon who could merge into his surroundings and change sex at will. In lipstick and mascara, high-heeled shoes and dresses from Marks and Spencer or a leather skirt and black stockings, he at times roamed London with a gun in his handbag⁸⁸

The reporting on Martin highlights how the press would use individual criminal lives as a model for stereotypes that ‘creat[e] moral ‘others’’.⁸⁹ There is a parallel here with how the press would often identify the perpetrators of various crimes as immigrants, even though they could establish no direct link between their status as immigrants and their crimes.⁹⁰ The Mail repeatedly characterized Martin as the ‘transvestite gunman’,⁹¹ and ran an in-depth feature on their life as Davina on London’s ‘transvestite scene’,⁹² but never showed how their transvestitism was directly linked to their crimes. Yet the narrative the Mail created invoked several transphobic stereotypes—the transvestite as a dangerous shapeshifter, the transvestite as a phallic threat (‘gun in his handbag’). This ‘wholly unwelcome blurring of genres (news and entertainment)’⁹³ established a quasi-fictional narrative, which like many narratives served the purpose of delineating what should be considered dangerous, threatening and abnormal.⁹⁴ Yet clearly the Mail also saw such narratives as highly lucrative—they were willing to pay £1,500 to Martin’s purported paramour Philip Lee for ‘Drag Photos’ of them.⁹⁵

There was a potential tension between the Mail’s social conservatism and its commercial fetishism, as the profit motive clashed with the impulse to render trans experiences unspeakable. The articles discussed above resolved this tension by representing trans lives through hypersexualized, hyperbolic and stigmatizing caricature, so that hypervisibility in the tabloid made everyday public visibility more difficult.

Conclusion

The Mail’s transphobia was at its most virulent where its authors feared a queering of wider society, that is where gender transgression could not be easily confined and might threaten to dilute normative British masculinity, and femininity. This is why the paper’s reaction to transgender themes in entertainment was defined not so much by the presence of cross-dressing so much as whether that cross dressing upheld or confronted established gender norms and sexual propriety. Yet ironically, in spite of the Mail’s formal desire to uphold its readership’s socially conservative values, including discretion on matters relating to sexuality and gender transgression, both its commercial fetishism and persecutory instincts led it to break the taboos it nominally strove to uphold. This increasing visibility—or at least, the increasing visibility of the trans lives the Mail wished to foreground—did not help trans people move through society. Trans individuals in the 1980s continued to live extremely secluded lives, as press condemnation amplified the stigma they experienced.⁹⁶ For the Mail itself, however, breaking its own taboos served a number of purposes—appealing to its readership’s fascination with gender ‘others’ helped sell newspapers, while narratives about transvestitism as a form of ‘extremism’ served as a means by which to galvanize the public against Labour in the context of the editorial alliance with the Thatcher government.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

W.J. Berridge

W.J. Berridge, School of History, Classics and Archaeology, The Armstrong Building, Newcastle University, Newcastle, NE1 7RU, UK; E-mail: [email protected]; Twitter: @WBerri85

Notes

1 Owen Jones, ‘Anti-trans zealots, know this: history will judge you’, The Guardian 15 December 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/15/trans-backlash-anti-gay-zealotry-section-28-homophobia.

2 See, e.g., Fone, Homophobia; Hatheway, Gilded Age Construction; Healey, Russian Homophobia.

3 James Kirkup, ‘Is Britain FINALLY coming to its senses over transgender madness?’, Daily Mail (DM) 3 March 2019, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6765249/JAMES-KIRKUP-Britain-FINALLY-coming-senses-transgender-madness.html.

4 Fae, ‘The Press’, 134.

5 Moyra Ashford, ‘Such emphasis on beauty leads to panic at 35’ The Sunday Times Aug 18 1985; Anthony Clare, ‘The Roots of Sexual Perversion’, The Sunday Times 6 March 1988; Annie Woodhouse, ‘When the husband’s secret comes out’, The Guardian 19 July 1989.

6 Linda Avery, ‘The Legal Labyrinth that faces the transsexual’, The Guardian 4 Oct.1982. Wendy Cooper, ‘The Man who Never Will Be’, The Guardian 18 Nov. 1986. Liz Hodgkinson, ‘‘Life after the man of the house becomes a woman’, Sunday Times 23 Oct.1988.

7 Fae, ‘The Press’

8 Heyam, Before we were Trans 146, 147 for the position that queer individual’s sexuality should be seen as integral to their gender identity, and a critique of recent efforts to separate queer experiences of gender and sexuality. See also Valentine, Imagining Transgender.

9 Bingham, Family Newspapers, 173–174; Bengry, ‘Profit (f)or the Public Good?’.

10 Shelley: Transpeople, 32–33.

11 Wickberg, ‘Homophobia’.

12 Bettcher, ‘Transphobia’.

13 See, e.g., Rao, Out of Time, 35, for the latter point. See also Namaste, ‘Gender-bashing’, 588.

14 Bettcher, ‘Transphobia’.

15 This is Herek’s understanding of homophobia, which can also be applied to transphobia. See Herek, ‘Beyond “homophobia”’, 14.

16 Richardson, Analysing Newspapers, 26-27.

17 Machin and Mayr, How to do Critical Discourse Analysis, 78.

18 Ochs, ‘Narrative’, 193. Richardson, Analysing Newspapers, 74.

19 Suffee, ‘Homosexuality and the law’, 260, 264-265.

20 Oram, Her Husband was a Woman!, 149; Playdon, The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes-Sempill, 222–226.

21 Playdon, The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes, 222.

22 Stryker, Transgender History, 19. Oram, ‘Cross-Dressing and Transgender’, 255.

23 Stryker, Transgender History, 19.

24 Jonze, Tim. ‘Julian Clary: I have the right to be a camp, effeminate homosexual’, The Guardian 23 September 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/sep/23/julian-clary-i-have-the-right-to-be-a-camp-effeminate-homosexual.

25 Stryker, Transgender History, 18.

26 Stryker, Transgender History, 19.

27 Like Heyam, I would use ‘they’ to avoid imposing a gender on historical individuals, rather than to specifically claim that the individual identified as non binary. Heyam, Before we were Trans, 29–30.

28 Addison, Mail Men, 173–174, 189–190. Curran and Seaton, Power without Responsibility, 126.

29 Smith, New Right Discourse. For the influence of the growing divide between left and right on the press, see Williams, Read all about it! 213. See also Curran, Gaber and Petley, Culture Wars.

30 Steele, ‘The Formative Years’, 59.

31 Smith, New Right Discourse, 197.

32 Smith, New Right Discourse, 183.

33 Richard Kay, ‘Eton collared over ‘gay manual’ for boys of 13’, DM 22 May 1987.

34 Curran, Gaber and Petley, Culture Wars, 28, 53.

35 Curran, Gaber and Petley, Culture Wars, 35–37, 103.

36 Brooke, Sexual Politics, 236.

37 Heyam, Before we were Trans, 147. Valentine, Imagining Transgender, 42–46; Suffee, ‘Homosexuality and the Law’, 260, 264–265.

38 Gordon Greig, ‘Foot upset by gay campaigners’, DM 27 Sep. 1982.

39 Paul Johnson, ‘Mad King Michael in his Court of Fools’, DM 1 Oct. 1982.

40 Suffee, ‘Homosexuality and the Law’, 250–277; Heyam, Before we were Trans, 147.

41 Richard Holliday and Rupert Genge, I am simply a man who wears skirts’, DM, 27 Sep. 1982

42 ‘A transvestite’s advice’, DM 14 Oct. 1982.

43 Curran, Gaber and Petley, Culture Wars, 103.

44 Frank Chapple ‘Fancy Dress Party’, DM 24 April 1986.

45 In March 2022, Jamie Wallis came out as Britain’s first transgender MP, although this was subsequent to his election. See Aubrey Allegreti, ‘Jamie Walis comes out as UK’s first openly transgender MP’, The Guardian 30 March 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/mar/30/tory-mp-jamie-wallis-trans-reveals-rape-ordeal.

46 Smith, New Right Discourse, 185.

47 DM 20 April 1983. The use of Siobhan McDermott’s deadname has been removed from this sentence.

48 DM 2 Sep. 1986.

49 Curran, Gaber and Petley, Culture Wars, 84-85.

50 DM 9 April 1986.

51 Gaber, Curran and Petley, Culture Wars, 15.

52 For a useful background on the politics of gay liberation, see Jagose, Queer Theory, 37-43.

53 Namaste, ‘Gender-bashing’, 589.

54 Oram, ‘Cross-dressing and transgender’, 260.

55 Oram, ‘Cross-dressing and transgender, 260.

56 Oram, ‘Cross-dressing and transgender’, 260, 272.

57 Black, ‘Whose finger on the button?’, 553, 560.

58 June Southworth, ‘The Importance of being Mary’, DM 14 June 1980.

59 See, for example, Mary Whitehouse, ‘Today’s Children are Deprived- of their Childhood!’, DM 27 Jan. 1981.

60 DM 23 June 1979.

61 Black, ‘Whose finger on the button?’, 560.

62 Playdon, The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes, 248.

63 Lorimer, ‘1966 and all that’.

64 Lorraine Kisly, ‘Crossing the frontiers of sex’, DM 4 April 1974.

65 Herbert Kretzmer, ‘The anarchist in love with an admiral’, DM 7 Sep. 1989.

66 See, eg., ‘Father of two becomes woman’ DM 6 March 1954.

67 For this background, see Stryker, Transgender History, 91-95.

68 ‘The boring wasteland of weirdo Warhol’, DM 12 Feb. 1981.

69 Suffee, ‘Homosexuality and the Law’, 252–253, 261–262.

70 Waugh cites Warhol and Hackett, The Warhol 60s.

71 See again Machin and Mayr, How to do Critical Discourse Analysis, 78; Ochs, ‘Narrative’, 193. Richardson, Analysing Newspapers, 74.

72 ‘Aunty Claire is Pure Agony’, DM 10 Oct. 1984.

73 ‘What Stanley Baxter really finds a drag’, DM 17 Oct. 1981.

74 DM 8 Dec. 1989.

75 For the more subversive character of this form of parody, see Butler, Gender Trouble, 186.

76 Bhabha, Location of Culture, 59.

77 Bhabha, Location of Culture, 104. For an accessible articulation of Bhabha’s arguments, see Nayar, Post-colonialism: A Guide for the Perplexed, 26-28.

78 Addison, Mail Men, 154-156.

79 Fae, ‘The Press’. Oram, Her Husband was a Woman!, 131.

80 Smith, New Right Discourse, 189.

81 Bingham, Family Newspapers, 173–174.

82 Aubrey Chalmers, ‘Secret Life of a Kinky Government scientist’, DM 19 April 1984.

83 ‘Sex op man suspended’, DM 16 March 1979.

84 Serano, ‘Skirt Chasers’.

85 Herbert Kretzmer, ‘Misfit gets even with Mum’, DM 30 Oct 1981.

86 For a Critical Discourse Analysis informed discussion of hyperbole, see Richardson, Analysing Newspapers, 65-66.

87 Shelley, Transpeople, 46.

88 Gill Swain and David Williams, ‘The vicious hatred of Houdini Martin’, DM 12 October 1983.

89 Machin and Mayr, How to do Critical Discourse Analysis, 78.

90 Richardson, Analysing Newspapers, 51-52.

91 ‘David Martin found hanged in his cell’, DM 14 March 1984.

92 ‘The nights when he was Davina’, DM 12 Oct 1983.

93 Richardson, Analysing Newspapers, 74.

94 Ochs, ‘Narrative’, 193. Richardson, Analysing Newspapers, 74.

95 ‘£1,500 for drag photos of David Martin’, Gay News 3 February 1983.

96 Playdon, The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes, 254.